Guus Bosman

What an incredible book. The structure and the composition and the language... just beautiful.

I actually started reading this book a few years ago and couldn't get past the sad passages about a young woman in the Bennemin family. The book is that compelling -- it makes you feel for some of the characters, deeply.

The main characters Vedder and Anijs are complicated figures, not very sympatetic most time and definitely very flawed men. The author described their inner thinking so well.

The book turned into a real page turner for me. I was so curious to see what happened at the end, and if the immigrants would make it to America.

Loved this book.

A beautiful book about the friendship of two boys, and the political changes and liberation of Indonesia.

I have known the title of this book for along time and it always intimated me. I was worried it would be as difficult as Multatuli. But in fact this was a quick and easy read.

I've had a copy of this book in my bookshelf for years, and finally found some time to read it a few months ago. It's a short, nostalgic sort of book. My father read it to me when I was little. I had forgotten the story line but the atmosphere I had not. Beautiful.

I read this while sitting on the porch in Hot Springs, VA while drinking a glass of merlot. Fantastic book, obviously, it being a Steinbeck. The edition I have here didn't have a summary or even a tagline so I didn't know anything about the book. With Steinbeck, that doesn't matter.

A lovely short book about the impact of various diseases and epidemics on human development. I like how the author is opiniated and her style is funny. "That was a monstrous thing to do", she wrote at some point. Enjoyable book on a sad subject.

It was published just before the discovery of Covid-19 which makes it all the more pungent. She actually wrote about "get really worried if you see people dying of pneumonia" -- and that's of course exactly what happened.

Plato's Complete Works! What a beautiful challenge. I would have never thought I would actually read all these works by Plato. This became one of my ever favorite books, both in its contents and the awesomeness of reading dialogues and good discussions from more than 2,500 years ago.

While I keep struggling through the last Plato books, I keep distracting myself with lighter fare. I recently read this memoir of a Dutch retiree who remember his three years as an alien in the US during the 1920s, when he jump ship in the harbor of NYC.

I liked reading this book. It was nostalgic at times. The author, an old man in the 1980s, was pondering how his life could have been if he had stayed in the US, maybe married one of the women he met. It made me really curious about his live after he was expelled from the US, back to Holland.

I'm still slogging through the complete works of Plato and it is getting boring. So I read "America give me a chance!", a hundred-year old book by a Dutch immigrant, Edward W. Bok. I didn't know much about him at all, but this is an interesting auto-biography. Edward met so many famous people in his life time, including several Presidents. His life work was editing a lady journal, and he's a gifted author.